


The Drill

by chainofclovers



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 16:05:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14674590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainofclovers/pseuds/chainofclovers
Summary: How many afternoons has she spent here? More than she could ever hope or want to recall, and never alone, never with just one other person, always with her group of friends, the other wives.





	The Drill

**Author's Note:**

> For a variety of reasons, I've been thinking a lot about the particular refuge queer women can offer to each other, and to women in general. In canon, Grace is so expansively enthusiastic about Vybrant, about insisting upon the message that women don't have to be defeated by old age. The events of season 4 challenge but do not destroy that insistence, and I started thinking about what it would be like for Grace, some months into the future, to have the chance to offer some manner of refuge to someone else.
> 
> A massive, heartfelt thank you to Kathryne for a fantastically helpful beta.
> 
> Note: This story alludes to disordered eating and alcohol abuse, though without graphic description.

It’s been a couple years, but lunch at the club smells exactly the way Grace remembers: freshly cut golf-course grass wafting in through the windows; martinis everywhere, acerbic but dizzying; the bland but insistent scent of chicken salad, chicken wings, chicken tenders, grilled chicken breasts, french fries, all polished off by guys at adjacent tables. Even the jingle of ice in cocktail shakers seems to have a smell. Even the voices, animated in perpetuity by the same old gossip and sports, strung together into what used to feel to Grace like a single endless day.

How many afternoons has she spent here? More than she could ever hope or want to recall, and never alone, never with just one other person, always with her group of friends, the other wives. No matter how old they got, they were always “the girls.” Always competing to order the smallest salad and eat the least of it, and drink the most drinks without going overboard. Competing for best look, best insult, best proof that the life each had was the life she wanted, confidently but without reflection.

Today she’s Janet’s guest. She sits across from her at a table for two, a little stunned to be here at all, much less alone with Janet, who quietly checked Grace in at the door and led her to the dining room at a pace Grace almost couldn’t maintain. She didn’t slow down on the way to their table either, although—thanks to the funeral circuit and Arlene’s almost innocent generosity with gossip—Janet knows neither of Grace’s knees are the originals, and that the second surgery is still recent. 

Janet’s texted request to meet for lunch was suspiciously casual; it’s been two years since Grace and Janet stopped being friends in another room in this building, and being nice to each other at funerals isn’t the same thing as mending a friendship. Grace has the life she wants, and that makes her dangerous, even if she suspects it’s also why she’s here. _You don’t have to go_ , Frankie said when Grace told her about the text. There wasn’t jealousy in her voice—just an interest in reminding Grace that social contracts are mostly in a person’s head. But Grace was too curious to stay home: the club is frozen in time, but she isn’t, and maybe Janet isn’t, either. She’s certain there’s a connection between Janet’s invitation and the way Grace has changed, and she’s willing to travel briefly onto Janet’s home turf to figure it out.

Now that they’re seated, Janet glances around the dining room, as if she can’t relax until she’s taken stock of the crowd. “Afraid you’ll run into someone you know?” Grace asks. She hopes it sounds like a joke, but it’s not, and it doesn’t. 

Janet gapes. “It’s Thursday.”

Grace calls up the memory of a long-atrophied social calendar, and she supposes that explains it. The girls never lunch on Thursdays, nor do the husbands golf, for some long-standing reason she no longer needs to know. 

“And anyway,” Janet continues, “fuck them.” 

_Fuck them_ , Grace echoes silently, subtracting Arlene from the blanket statement. Still, she can’t help but notice that even if Janet claims not to care about those people, she’s invited Grace to the club on a Thursday nonetheless. And who’s “them,” anyway? Their old group has splintered, death and lesser circumstances destroying the cohesion they once tried to enjoy. They could talk about it, but they don’t. Grace and Janet don’t talk about where Arlene lives now. They don’t talk about Grace’s blip in the same facility. They don’t talk about Mary’s attempt to downsize, thwarted by the inopportune arrival of her son and his entire family, which Grace only knows about because Arlene’s generous speech extends to her, too. They don’t talk about Janet rattling around in her sprawling house with her husband. They don’t talk about Grace tucked into a small apartment she shares with Frankie, how everybody knows what it means that they live there with each other. 

Grace wants to talk, even if Janet’s the one listening. She lacks only a first sentence, a way in. 

When the waiter comes to take their drink orders, Grace asks for a club soda with lime so quickly that she can almost fool herself into believing she hasn’t been thinking about drinks since she walked into the dining room and heard ice. Janet’s eyebrows arch practically into her hairline; her mouth asks for her usual martini. When the waiter walks away, she doesn’t ask Grace questions. If she did, Grace would try to tell her that what Janet just witnessed isn’t sobriety but a certain carefulness that’s easier and more confusing and takes a lot of her energy these days. She might tell Janet something about her most recent drink, wine yesterday evening on the little apartment balcony with Frankie, looking out over the pool at the center of their complex. Something, but not everything. She’d keep to herself Frankie’s hand on her back, the meeting of their purple-stained mouths. It’s hot for early June, and last night they should have been drinking white wine or iced tea or martinis or plain water, but Grace wanted the neutral warmth of red wine, the way it takes on room temperature even outdoors, wanted the trickles of sweat down the small of her back, the shouts from the pool fading into nothing. Grace lives in Southern California. She likes long-sleeved shirts. It’s been years since summer excited her, but this one does.

When the drinks arrive, she raises her glass to Janet, though they don’t toast to anything. She’ll pretend the club soda with lime is satisfying, and maybe it will be. 

After they order food, Janet has to ask. “I thought you didn’t like sandwiches,” she says, almost accusatory, and Grace feels a pang of guilt. She didn’t order a chicken salad sandwich to make Janet feel bad about her side salad, but it’s possible she did select it to make a point. To ask Janet to look at her choosing what she wants.

“I don’t like subs,” Grace clarifies. “I hate fluffy bread.” She smiles. Thinking about sandwiches makes her think about Frankie, again, brings a fresh flood of dopamine she can’t shut up about this time. “Frankie makes grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches,” she says. The first time she was offered one, Grace tried it because it was a gift: breakfast in bed on one of the first days they woke up together. Frankie split the sandwich in two, and being responsible for only half felt like a mercy, as did Frankie’s hand on her thigh as they ate. “It’s a pretty good combination.” 

Janet’s face flickers with habitual Frankie-related judgment, but she gets it under control. 

_Elvis ate these fried_ , Frankie had said. _Oh! Almost forgot to do Elvis penance!_ She got up to put on music, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, walked back to bed bobbing her head to Tharpe’s guitar. _In this house, we respect the real parent of rock ‘n’ roll._

“So,” Grace says. “How’s Ray?”

“He’s fine. He golfs four mornings a week, and I guess he fills the other hours somehow...smokes cigars out back, and we both pretend I don’t know.” Janet smirks. “How’s Frankie?”

There’s a startling equivalency in the question, in Janet’s choice to follow up Grace’s small talk about her husband with small talk about Frankie. The question doesn’t feel like a trap, either. “Good,” Grace says. “Spending lots of time with her granddaughter. We both do.” On Sundays, if Grace wants to see Frankie before five p.m., she has to go to Bud and Allison’s house. With Frankie’s help, Bud and Allison use Sundays to run errands, do housework, catch a movie. Sometimes Grace drops Frankie off in the morning, does her own thing for a while so Frankie can have time alone with Faith, then comes back for the last few hours of the afternoon. Faith is a good-natured baby. She squawks with laughter over almost nothing; she thinks everyone’s funny, even Grace. 

“What’s it like?” Janet asks. 

The question is terribly timed—the food arrives, and fresh drinks. The salad dressing is wrong, so the waiter makes a second trip back to the table, then a third to bring extra napkins. 

“What’s what like,” Grace says when things have settled. If they hadn’t been interrupted, she’d have answered the real question, but now they need a reset. “Babysitting Frankie’s granddaughter?”

Janet’s face pinches. “No,” she says. “You know what I mean. Living with Frankie.”

Living _with_ Frankie. “We miss our house,” Grace says. “We miss the beach. But we’re close to downtown now, which is fun, and—it’s a new chapter.” A new chapter? Who is she, a guest on Oprah? “It’s kind of nice, living somewhere new for, um, something so new.”

Janet nods slowly. “And you’re, you know...doing things. You and Frankie?” 

It’s Grace’s turn to gape. “...yes.” Doing things. She does lots of things with Frankie. She’s danced with Frankie in at least three kitchens, because Frankie finds anticipating dinner very energizing. She’s felt strongly enough about the things they fight about that she’s cried during arguments, absolutely no hope of saving her emotions for the shower. She’s signed power of attorney documents, has determined when she believes life is no longer life, knows Frankie’s answers to the same questions. She’s reached for Frankie, for every part of Frankie, traded shock for satisfaction with Frankie’s help. _That’s okay, have at ‘em_ , is a thing Frankie has said to her. _This is the ‘it’s five o’clock somewhere’ of boob grabbing._ She’s had sex that leaves her limp and exhausted and somehow still hungry for more, sex for which she used to lack the words. Her words were so inadequate once, without action to back them up—as inadequate, perhaps, as Janet’s words. 

“I thought so,” Janet says. She seems satisfied, but there’s something nervous in her voice, something that prevents her from making it all the way to smug.

Intellectually, Grace knows that most people don’t run a vibrator company, that most people don’t spend what feels like every moment of every day considering flesh, considering pleasure. The reminder—that for some, verbal confirmation of “doing things” counts as titillating conversation—is still useful. Grace never leaves the house without the Square reader and at least three Mini Ménages. She’s always prepared to represent Vybrant. This is different, being the spokesperson not for the business but for a more personal relationship. 

Janet downs the last slug of her first drink. She sets the glass aside, pulls the second drink closer. But instead of bringing it to her lips, she stares at Grace. For an awful moment, Grace wonders if Janet is going to ask her if she’s ever been attracted to her. She hasn’t, and will have no trouble saying so, but still dreads the exchange. She’s heard this is a frequent line of questioning from straight people; Grace has never in her life considered asking such a question, which she supposes is yet another differentiating factor between herself and heterosexuality. 

“I’m thinking about leaving Ray,” Janet says. She keeps her voice low; these Thursday diners aren’t strangers, even if they aren’t people she knows.

“Oh, Janet.” 

“We’re not—”

“Happy?”

Janet cringes at the word. She shrugs. 

“Do it,” Grace says, reckless because sobriety allows her recklessness. On club soda and lime, her convictions are absolutely hers. She’s always hated Ray. He’s a Trump voter. He has “zero complaints.” He doesn’t like women or dogs. More specifically, he doesn’t like Pomeranians, and he doesn’t like Janet—he thinks she’s silly, doesn’t even notice the way she’s starved herself into a snarl to prove him wrong. Once, right in front of Janet, he turned to Grace and waved his phone at her and started a sentence with “You’re smart, read this,” as if to say Janet wasn’t, as if to say he wasn’t interested in having this conversation with his own wife. _Better Janet than me_ , Grace had thought at the time. The memory exhausts her now—she still had at least two years left with Robert at that point. 

“I’m still thinking,” Janet says. She pats her mouth with her napkin, doesn’t bring it back to her lap. If it were a paper napkin, it would be in shreds. 

“Come over for drinks sometime,” Grace says. “Don’t bring Ray,” she adds. Frankie can handle Janet if she's a project, a mystery. “You’re gonna hate our new place, but we’d love to have you.” 

She doesn’t know what Janet wants. She hardly knows anything about Janet at all, and it’s strange to think that—after this confession—she now knows more than most. She can’t just suggest women, though she feels a rush of tenderness at the thought of Janet with someone kind, someone who tolerates none of her bullshit, someone with a soft safe body and a penchant for asking questions. She can’t say any of this out loud, but she can invite Janet over sometimes, give her an example of happiness. 

“Maybe so,” Janet says, looking at the wall behind Grace’s shoulders.

When lunch is over, they walk to the parking lot together. Janet’s car is closest. “Wait,” Grace says, and Janet lets go of the door handle. Today is even hotter than yesterday—not yet hot enough for the asphalt to ripple, to bend perception, but almost. She fishes around in her purse for a Mini Ménage. “Take this,” she says, and suddenly misses Babe more sharply than she has in months. 

Janet scoffs at the little white box in her hand, the purple and pink and gold swirl of the logo, but she takes it. “I'm not like you,” she says. She could mean lesbianism, or employment. She could mean a scoop of chicken salad, pressed between two slices of bread.

Grace dips her head to acknowledge she’s heard. Now they should lean in and kiss the air, they should exclaim how nice a time they’ve had, they should promise to do it again soon. “I’ll text you about drinks,” Grace says. She pauses, considers. “Fuck them.” Fuck Ray, she means. 

“Yeah.” Janet opens the door, hoists herself into the massive Lexus SUV like a gymnast who’s spent a lifetime on technique. “Fuck them.”


End file.
